Slide On The Run

by Mick Farren

  Lupo sighed. "Now?"

  But, instead of being resolved, the conflict for the loyalty of the native troops was interrupted by a series of explosions that came from behind Slide and Lupo, from the other side of the city. The two turned and looked. Lupo sadly shook his head. "I fear the Martian revolution has come too late."

  Four of the tall, tripod fighting machines of the Slimy Things were attacking the walls of the city with the scarlet wash of heat rays and the poisonous green pulse of particle beams. Maybe a dozen or more were striding over the Grand Canal, smashing the complex pipework in the process, causing jets of water to fountain high into the Martian morning. Air support came with the fighting machines in the form of streamlined metal ovoids flashing with electrical charges that, when they had risen to a sufficient intensity, arced jaggedly to the ground to cause fires and more explosions each time they struck. Once a section of the city wall was burned and bombarded to rubble and ash, the breach was filled with battalion formations of metalmen, the human-simulacra ground troops of the Slimy Things, who were far too wet and vulnerable to do any of their own fighting. With more courage than common sense, a crisp detachment of Martian cavalry attempted to confront a fighting machine, and was burned to a crisp in an X-ray moment for its bravado.

  That was sufficient for Lupo. "I don't know about you, Slide, but I have seen enough cities fall in my time. I could miss the rest of this drama."

  Slide glanced up. "I tend to agree with you."

  High in the sky huge flying discs were converging to form a geometric hovering pattern.

  "It looks as though the Slimy Things have acquired telezero technology from the Treens. Unless of course the Treens acquired it from them. It can get hard to figure who's doing what for whom, when time's up its own ass. "

  As Slide had feared, a bolt of heliotrope energy flashed up from somewhere beyond the horizon and struck the discs. They in turn translated the dazzling light into a single, narrow-beam projection, directed down at the city. Where the beam touched, all was dematerialized, and it slashed the metropolis leaving scars of nothing over a hundred yards wide.

  "Let's go while there's still some of this place left to leave." Slide avoided Lupo's eyes. "I hate to tell you this. Seeing as you're a vampire, and can't be too happy about all this exotic light radiation…"

  "Tell me what, Slide."

  "Getting out of here may not be exactly what you'd call simple without a howdy hole, which I don't think even existed this long ago."

  Lupo looked old and dangerous. "So what are you telling saying, demon? That we're stuck here?"

  "Unless we find ourselves a Carter machine or some good facsimile thereof."

  Lupo blinked. "Well that's no problem."

  Slide was surprised. It hadn't occurred to him that the Victorians had their own Carter machines, although it did make some sense. "It isn't?"

  "There's the big one that brought me here. It's in a cental vault, deep under the tower, close to the stasis generator."

  Slide blinked. "A Carter machine and a stasis generator in the same place? That's a wigged-out concept."

  "Shall we go there instead of standing around discussing it?"

  Slide nodded, and while Mina and her courtiers stood transfixed, watching the destruction of the city in horror, the demon and the vampire headed back inside the tower. Just as they were about to pass through the arch that led to the interior, Slide turned and gestured to the bridge on which the interrupted Martian revolution had been about to start. "You don't happen to know the name of that do you?"

  "The Beckham Bridge."

  Slide shrugged. He didn't understand the reference.

  Lupo led Slide quickly along corridors and down flights of curved, Turquoise Tower steps, with what appeared to be an unerring sense of direction. Slide could only wonder how the nosferatu, who claimed to have been on Mars only slightly longer than Slide, could know his way around the labyrinthine layout of the place. He certainly proved that he did when they quickly arrived at the brass and steel gates of a multi-shaft, high-speed pneumatic elevator. Lupo dialed for an down-designated car, and one arrived in a matter of second. This was in no way too soon for Slide, who could feel the very structure of the tower trembling from what could only be the Slimy Things' assault on the city. They stepped into the car, and, no sooner had the lift gates hissed and clanged closed, it dropped like a stone, obviously descending to the deep bowels beneath Queen Mina's tower. As the elevator's free fall mitigated, and the two regained the floor under their feet, Lupo handed Slide the radium revolver that he had taken from him during the carriage ride to the tower. "You may find a need for this."

  "Do you have a weapon?"

  Lupo glanced at Slide with a noticeable disdain. "I am nosferatu, Yancey Slide. Among humans, I have no need of weapons."

  The elevator's stop was abrupt enough to cause Slide to bend at the knees, although Lupo didn't waver. The gates of the car slid back to reveal that had descended to a vault of energy. The air smelled of ozone, positrons, and charged dark matter, and a high pitched hum rose and fell but never dropped out of the dogs-only audio range. Lupo hadn't exaggerated when he'd said that the place was deep under the tower. Slide felt as though they could not be that far from the Martian planetary core, and at least a part of the cavernous interior was only a faux-reality, kept in place by a stasis generator. Slide didn't like to be anywhere near a stasis generator. He's seen too may of them in his time with Billy Oblivion, and he didn't like the way their center never held.

  Lupo again seemed to be reading Slide's reactions. "Let's just concentrate on the Carter machine, shall we?"

  Slide put aside his dislike of stasis generators, and turned and looked the thing up and down. "That is one big motherfucker."

  And indeed it was. No simple chair, lever, and revolving power canopy like the one he'd ridden from Doc Zen's place what now seemed like an age ago. A towering Faraday cage, awaited them, topped by multiple spinning blades; a huge brass and steel construction that was a undeniable peak in the massive Victorian super-technology of time machines. For a moment, Slide stood and stared with undisguised admiration. Who had put Queen Mina up to all of this? She was so tenuously connected with even her own reality, he found it hard to believe she had devised all this on her own, and the set-up was way past the capabilities of Sir Richard Barton or any of the other self-important courtiers. Dracula? He doubted it. The cavern had nothing of the Tepes stamp to it. When Slide had last seen the Count, he hadn't even liked steam trains. Of course, there was no accounting for radical change in this cosmos, but he still wondered who the hell had Her Majesty been hanging with?

  "Shall we use the damn thing, or just stand and admire it."

  Slide blinked back to the challenge at hand, and waved Lupo ahead of him. "So go aboard, my friend. After you."

  Lupo treated Slide to a dour look. "You had better go first, demon. I have no idea how to operate this thing."

  "That might be a problem."

  Lupo looked concerned. "You can't run the machine either?"

  "I can probably figure it out, but the first question is where's the dope?"

  Lupo frowned. "The dope? What are you talking about?"

  "The dope. The tetradetoxin, the zombie juice. We can't ride the Gridley Wave without it."

  "I took no potions when I came here."

  Slide suddenly felt trapped. "Yeah, well, that may be your nosferatu metabolism, but I have to be seriously medicated before I can be hurled willy-nilly across space and time. You know what I mean? I don't want to get to where we're going and not have, for instance, a body. I've had enough of those games. I'm through pulling rotting rabbits out of threadbare top hats."

  "You have to have this tetradetoxin?"

  "Damn fucking right I do."

  Lupo seemed to be considering the problem, but before he could proffer an answer, a loud pneumatic hiss, and a sudden gust of very cold air, announced the arrival of a second elevator car. It gates clanged op
en. Slide and Lupo turned and found themselves facing the Queen, escorted by Sir Richard Barton, Harriot Marwood, Captain Flashman, and three human guards in hussar's uniforms.

  Barton immediately barked officiously at them. "Slide, Lupo, step away from the that machine, dammit. The Queen has to be removed from the war zone."

  Slide knew he spoke for Lupo. "Fuck the Queen."

  Lupo chuckled deep from his Italian roots. "I think you already did."

  Barton and Marwood had weapons in their hands, and the hussars were raising their radium rifles, but Slide didn't even have to react. Just like it was 1880, and he was still hanging with the Curly Bill Brocius and the Cowboys. He laid fire from the radium revolver until the power pellet was exhausted, and, by that time, only he, Lupo, and the Queen were left standing. Queen Mina looked down dispassionately down at the dead, and then up at Slide. "Don't you think you perhaps over-reacted?"

  Slide shrugged. "I never did like your crew."

  The Queen nodded. "So do we get into the machine and leave this place? Or do we wait for the Slimy Things to come to either fry or digest us?"

  Slide glanced at Lupo. He didn't have to speak. Should they take her, or was Mina Harker just an unwarranted complication? Lupo spread his hands. "She is a friend of the Count. And she might have the drugs you need."

  Slide locked eyes with Mina. "Do you have the dope?"

  "It's in the machine."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Trust me."

  Slide turned and stepped inside the Faraday cage of the big Carter machine. "I don't know why I'm doing this."

  Lupo and Mina followed. "Take a red pill from the dispenser."

  Something akin to a brass and glass, double cylindrical gumball machine was bolted to one of the uprights of the cage. One tube contained red pills, the other green pills.

  "A red pill?"

  "That's right."

  Slide clicked a green pill into a brass cup

  at the base of the two tubes. He picked it up, looked at it, and then swallowed it. A blinding impact pain hit the rear of the base of his skull and reality

  turned black.

  Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, attempting to escape the collapse of the neo-Victorian colony on Mars is slammed into unconsciousness by the green pill from the dispenser in the Carter Machine beneath the palace of Queen Mina.

  Episode Ten

  Lost In Space

  White, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, pain white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, pain white, white, pain white, white, pain white, white, pain, white, white, white, pain white, white, white, pain white, white, pain, white, pain, white, pain, white, pain, WHITE PAIN!

  "Motherfucker!"

  Finally Slide could see. He was deep in the Gantenbrink matter, and that could not be described in any three dimensional language if you wanted to keep your sanity. A Dead Cat bounced by, morphing with every bound.

  "Hey up there, Slide. Yo bro, wadda know?"

  Slide didn't respond. In the Gantenbrink, nothing was real. Except the pain.

  "Hey up there, Slide…" The last word reverberated long as the creature bounced away. "Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide."

  "White pain on you too, motherfucker."

  And then, for an instant, Slide was in a neon-shamrock-and-cigar-smoke Irish tavern-of-unreality among mobsters in double-breasted pinstripes playing cards with Roman soldiers and IRA gunmen, with the high voices of a boys' choir from the cloister singing in the background, but mercifully it didn't last. Slide knew it was a vignette from Hell, or, at the very least, Purgatory and Slide had no truck with Catholicism. All human, afterlife illusions were bad, but that was one of the worst, and the one most wholly at odds with what really happened when the oh-so-fragile fuckers breathed their last.

  Fortunately, he quickly found himself free floating. Starfields were all round him and the Gantenbrink was gone. Somewhere, maybe a hundred million miles away, raw energy was spiral-sucked into the time trap of a black hole's infinite maw. The body of Johnny Yuma was faithfully reassembling around him, and more along with. Slide found himself being clothed in what seemed to be an ornate and very elegant suit of space armor, black byzantine plasteel, with the traditional clear Lucite bubble helmet, and the smoothest tuck and roll jointing. As more of the suit assembled from nothing, Slide could see that it was complexly engraved, with the Green-jade Basilisk of the Knights of Galifrey, to which, of course, Slide was actually entitled, emblazoned on the chest plate. A heavy, custom-crafted blaster hung from a strap-down clamshell, low on his right hip. The weapon was so serious, Slide would have considered it to verge on cumbersome had he not been all too well aware of its businesslike overkill. The 75-gig modified Raymond was top-shelf firepower, and clearly fabricated by some very particular, master weapon-smith, probably in the Rhebzad mountain caves of arctic Mongo, if the brass-knuckle, crow-foot grip was any indication. The blaster was off-set on his left side by a Capulet vibrafoil that swung from a breakaway Venezian sling, and tapped against the armor of his left leg as he moved. The outfit was fine by Slide. Slick, stylish, and it kept out the void, and he liked the fact that he was also heavily and elegantly armed, but, after so many immortal eons, he was under no illusion that its materialization was, in any way random. Either the work of an unconscious extension of his own greater demon-self, or an interested outside party, with too much power and definitely too much inside perception?

  "But, either way, why am I all done up as if I was expecting the Pirates of The Lower Quadrant? And if I am, where the fuck are they?"

  Neither space pirates nor any other thing else was visible anywhere in the proximity of Slide's immediate present. He free-floated in what appeared to be intergalactic space, which was about as dislocated as a body could get. Fear parabolics were cutting through his armor and, all round him, possibly sentient particles searched for partners in the dance of annihilation. Why all the palaver with the hardware if the Gridley wave had dumped him here in the middle of nothing? And where were Lupo and Queen Mina who had supposedly left Mars at the same time he had? Slide had no real idea how exactly a Gridley wave functioned, but he didn't believe that it would simply reassemble him in the back of the black stuff. Surely the double-damned piece of junk required some kind of destination in order to function. Even a free form time/dimension jump had to have a start and end. The starts and ends might be totally repugnant and unsuitable, but at least they came with a bit of workable reality attached. He had to believe that some substantial tangibility was somewhere nearby.

  "But why the fuck can't I see it?"

  And then, no sooner had he uttered the fate testing, synchronous words, he saw it. Huge and intricate and, at the same time, possessing a vast and fragile delicacy. "Goddamn it, to hell. When is destiny going to cut me a break?"

  An Eloi bio-craft had floated oh-so silently into his perception. By Slide's reckoning, the petals of the sail stretched nine hundred Earth miles, and yet were insubstantial as gossamer, spread and trimmed, with constant adjustment, by a system endless and impossibly complicated rigging, to trap the starlight and be carried by its momentum, until after a hundred years of acceleration, the vessel all but matched the speed of light itself, slowing only enough to maintain conclusive mass and three relative spacial dimensions.

  "From ancient Mars to the full flowers of evil. My fucking karma must have rotted and died." He look
ed around. "And what the fuck happened to Lupo and the Queen? Why aren't they here to deal with the goddamned Eloi?"

  Slide didn't for a moment entertain any doubt that the Eloi bio-craft was his ultimate destination, or bother to wonder why he had come to it by such a roundabout route. He was not in the least surprised when a long and continually extending tendril, like a transparent, ghost-leaf tentacle, detached itself from a part of the complex main-mass closest to him, and started moving tentatively in his direction. Someone or something aboard the ship had sensed his presence in empty space and was bringing him in. He could only assume that Lupo the vampire and Queen Mina Harker were still riding to Gridley Wave to who knew where, or had dropped off it even before he had.

  "I guess that's the last I'll see of them."

  As the tendril came toward him, he unsnapped the Raymond's holster, but didn't draw the weapon. He had heard all the stories about bio-craft that consumed all other organic life as fuel, but, since Slide tried to avoid outer space, he had never seen such one of the fabled things for himself, and ignorance was a very good reason to be the one to initiate an overtly hostile act. It paid to be circumspect around the wholly alien, and although the Eloi were approximately human, the strange sentient ships that carried them were far from it.

  The tendril was close, halted some three meters from him. Small sub-fibers

  grew from the end, and made the final approach. Slide's left hand eased stealthily to the Capulet vibrafoil. If anything went wrong, he could at least attempt to slash himself free. The tendril either saw the move or sensed his intention, and hesitated. He raised his hand from the blade. The fibers came on. They touched the chest plate of his space armor, and instant feelings of well-being and euphoria swept over him. He knew he was being deliberately fed the goodvibes, but he gave the tendril the benefit of the doubt, and assumed the calming influence was well intentioned.